"Le Bateau Ivre," painted by Jan Willem Bruins as part of "Poems on Walls," 1992.
Rimbaud's Wall
Rue Férou, 6th Ar.
Many walls in Paris are subtly embedded with stories. One easily could pass by them without note. Not so with a wall on rue Férou between the Jardin du Luxembourg and Saint-Sulpice Cathedral. This wall shouts out the brilliant images of a young poet from the provinces who sought out the bohemian life in Paris.
The poem “Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat) by Arthur Rimbaud is painted on five huge panels. The 100-line poem was painted on the wall in 2012 as part of an annual poetry festival. It describes the doomed sea voyage of a sailor who is filled with despair and visions in his water-logged (drunken) boat.
"Le Bateau Ivre" (The Drunken Boat)
"Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,
I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,
Bearing, delicious jam for good poets
Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure."
Rimbaud wrote the poem at age 16 and sent it to the established poet Paul Verlaine, who was so impressed that he invited Rimbaud to Paris. And here the story turns mythic: Rimbaud and Verlaine commenced a fiery two-year love affair that pretty much destroyed Verlaine’s domestic and literary life, something Rimbaud appeared callously unconcerned with. Said he, on Verlaine’s hesitancy to leave his wife and infant and run off together: “To hell with your wife!” Rimbaud lived by his own artistic vision, which burned furiously and briefly.
Rimbaud’s time in Paris was quintessentially Bohemian: He was impoverished and disheveled, got drunk in taverns and behaved outrageously at literary gatherings. Rimbaud is not the only reason that creative souls come to Paris, but when you picture a poet seeking his muse in the City of Light, the delicate, youthful face of Rimbaud comes to mind. The location for the poem mural: Rimbaud was said to have recited the poem at age 17 at a cafe in the vicinity.
Rimbaud left a relatively light imprint on literary Paris during his lifetime. In fact, his literary life there was a failure; he alienating virtually everyone he met with his boorish behavior and unkempt appearance. He arrived in Paris at age 17, fresh from the provinces.
He wrote poetry for only a few year, then—to the dismay of admirers to this day—he retired his pen by age 20. He spent the next 17 years traveling, mostly outside France. He died in Marseille in 1891 at age 37. In the course of his short life, only about a year was spent in Paris. And much of that time, he was drunk and insufferable.
The fact that Rimbaud’s poem decorates nearly a city block when he was essentially a passing tourist in Paris says a lot about the lofty place where Parisians hold writers and artists. On today’s wokeness scale, Rimbaud would hardly pass the smell test, as a debauched, marriage-wrecking poet who in later life dabbled in arms sales and the slave trade, but his example lives on as one who, at least briefly, lied a life fully committed to his artistic vision and conventions be damned.
Much of Rimbaud’s artistic vision can be credited to one of his inspirations, and a true son of Paris: Charles Baudelaire. Born in the Quartier Latin, he emerged as a bohemian by age 18, dressing in black and frequenting the cafes. By 20, he declared his true calling as a writer, and from then on never worked an honest job in his life. He came to know everyone worth knowing in the literary and artistic milieu of Paris in the mid-19th century.
Rimbaud regarded Baudelaire as a god—and clearly Baudelaire deserves a five-panel wall in Paris more than his younger admirer. Baudelaire has a number of walls, in fact, mostly at places where he fell behind on his rent. A wall marker on Hotel Lefevre de la Malmaison on Quai de Bethune on Ile Saint Louis reads: “Baudelaire Y Vecut en 1842 et 1843.” Another plaque marked his birthplace at 17 rue Hautefeuille in the Quartier Latin, and on Hotel Voltaire on Quai Voltaire he gets a group mention, along with Sebelius, Wagner and Wilde, for “their stay in Paris." Further, there is rue Charles Baudelaire with Charles Baudelaire Elementary School in the 12th Arrondissement near Bastille. And a Hotel Baudelaire Opera.
The most fitting marker of the quintessential poet of modern Paris is found in the Montparnasse Cemetery: the cenotaph of Baudelaire. Rimbaud’s Wall is just a starting point that brings us to it, about 10 blocks away. Uber say’s it’s 8 minutes by car, but you can be a true flaneur and walk it. In the process, you connect one generation of Parisian poets with another.
Baudelaire's Cenotaph
Montparnasse Cemetery, 14th Ar.
The Cimetière du Montparnasse is host to many celebrated writers and artists who now are labeled “permanent Parisians.” Some notables are remembered with modest gravestones, others with imposing monuments—a prime example being the cenotaph of Charles Baudelaire.
This cenotaph (an empty tomb honoring someone buried elsewhere) was created for Baudelaire by a group of devotees seeking to rectify an injustice done at his burial. Baudelaire’s mother, against her son’s dying wishes, buried his remains in the family plot in Section 6 of the Montparnasse cemetery. There, top billing on the gravestone already had gone to General Jacques Aupick, the poet’s deceased stepfather, a man he had despised. The bard of Paris is listed one row down, like a headliner’s opening act on a theater marquee.
Baudelaire’s cenotaph lies on the opposite side of the cemetery, in Section 27. It was dedicated in 1902, 35 years after Baudelaire’s death. The poet's devotees were powerless to disturb his place of rest beside a mother and stepfather who did all they could to derail his creative quest for revelation through debauchery. But they could celebrate his greatness at a judicial distance.
The cenotaph displays Baudelaire's stern visage of the poe, looking down from atop a tall column. His chin rests on his clenched hands, like a two-fisted version of “The Thinker.” In fact, the sculpture was begun by Auguste Rodin, but due to a quarrel within the project committee, the task of completing the work was handed to a lesser known sculptor, José de Charmoy. Beneath the poet is the outline of a winged bat. A shrouded body lies on the base. On the front of the base is one word: “Baudelaire.”
The faces of "Stone Parisians" abound on building facades throughout the city. They often are overlooked, but they are always looking at us.
"Grief’s Alchemy"
"My heaven turns to hell! There in the sky
I see a corpse, familiar, lie
Wrapped in a winding-sheet, a shroud
That once I might have thought a cloud.
And on the heavenly shores my eye
Goes building great sarcophagi."
—Les Fleurs du Mal
A Native Son
Baudelaire was a true native son of Paris, born in the Quartier Latin and baptized at Saint Sulpice Cathedral. He lived at 40-some places around Paris, notably on Ile Saint-Louis and around Saint Germaine des Pres. In one hour, you could walk between those key geographic points of his life and his final resting place in Montparnasse Cemetery.
If you have another hour top spare, you can walk to the location of the nursing home where he died, on rue du Dome in the now-upscale 16th Arrondissement. The location outlies Baudelaire’s usual haunts, but at least it adjoins Avenue Victor Hugo, named for a fellow writer and poet to whom he dedicated three poems (though he later berated Hugo as an “idiot”). They were “frenemies” in today’s parlance.
Literary critics have produced blizzards of theories on Baudelaire’s musicality and harmonic undertones, on his sensuousness and spirituality, on his rejection of bourgeois values and embrace of les peuples de les rues. Then, of course, there was his obsession with spleen (in the sense of melancholia). “Paris Spleen,” representing his transition to prose poems late in his career, was published posthumously. “Les Fleurs du Mal” has four different poems titled Spleen:
"Spleen"
"Vexed at the city bleak, damp Pluviôse.
Empties his urns forbidding chill; and while
Death reins on drear faubourgs, he soddens those
Pale shades who dwell in graveyard domicile."
—-Les Fleurs du Mal
Passage Saint-Paul, le Marais
Sartre and Benjamin Go Walking....
Jean-Paul Sartre penned a critique of Baudelaire, one that veers from illuminating insights to theoretical black holes. In this “existential psychoanalysis,” Sartre picks up a Freudian theme of maternal abandonment that began early in Baudelaire’s life when his widowed mother remarries. The fissure sent young Baudelaire on a path of eternal solitude, a “horror” that he saw as his destiny. Sartre portrays the poet as an “eternal minor” and “middle-aged adolescent,” protected by others and walking backward in life toward death. As such, he lived in reflective consciousness, “exploring himself like a knife explores a wound.”
Walter Benjamin, whose own tortured life fit Sartre’s wound-probing analogy, sees Baudelaire’s Paris as a place of allegory and dreams: “Baudelaire’s genius, which feeds on melancholy is a genius of allegory. With Baudelaire, for the first time, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry of place is the opposite of all poetry of the soil. The gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays a profound alienation. It is the gaze of the flaneur…who seeks refuge in the crowds…the veil through which the familiar city is transformed into phantasmagoria.”
One particular aspect of Baudelaire’s poetry and prose poems puzzles and challenges me: his dearth of grounded specificity in describing the city that he explored all his life and which is imprinted (though allegorically) all over his work. There is scarcely the name of a street, church or monument cited in all his verse and prose. Baudelaire’s Paris seems to have resided in his mind, untethered to time and place.
“That which is created by the Mind is more living than Matter.”
—Intimate Journals
Surely, Baudelaire applied this notion to dealing with his dire financial straits, brought on by irresponsible spending early in his adulthood and lasting until his death:
“Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor, write 50 lines upon some extraterrestrial subject, and you will be saved.”
—Intimate Journals
Café Society, Rue de Bretagne, le Marais
Of course, one might counter, that Baudelaire was a poet, first and foremost. He was a Romantic and Symbolist who wrote in allegories. Providing a Paris guidebook for wannabe poets of posterity was hardly on his to-do list.
Yet Baudelaire’s “Paris without markers” is all the more curious in view the transformative time in which he lived. He witnessed Paris undergoing its most radical change from antiquity to modernity: Haussmannization. Over the 1850s and 1860s, entire neighborhoods of ancienne Paris were demolished (and their rabble displaced). Paris was transformed with new, broad boulevards and parks, lit by streetlights to promote promenading in the evening air.
And through it all, here was Baudelaire, one of the foremost observers of the city, a flaneur who walked its streets every day, his mind floating between past and present. Put another way, by Sartre: “He carefully delimited the geography of his existence by deciding to drag his miseries around with him in a great city.” Would it be asking too much if he only had penned a poem that bitched about Haussmann’s demolition of 70 small streets on Ile de la Cité?
Yes, apparently it would! We have to dig, but everywhere in Baudelaire, there is Paris, in symbols. Literal references to the city’s massive urban transformation exist, but they are rare:
“Cramer profoundly hated—and he was perfectly right, in my opinion—apartments built in long, straight lines and architecture imported into family homes.”
—La Fanfarlo
Rarer still, are markers where Baudelaire comes close to expressing enthusiasm for change:
“The Eyes of the Poor”
“That evening, a little tired, you wanted to sit down in front of a new café forming the corner of a new boulevard still littered with rubbish, but that already displayed proudly its unfinished splendors. The cafe was dazzling. Even the gas burned with an ardor of a début, and lighted with all its might the blinding whiteness of the walls, the expanse of mirrors, the gold cornices and moldings,…all history and all mythology pandering to gluttony.”
The story is suddenly darkened by the author’s fixation on a weary man with two young children dressed in rags. Their six eyes stare wondrously at the sparkling café, something right before them yet unreachable from their meager station. Then comes his lover’s coarse remark:
“Those people are insufferable with their great saucer eyes. Can’t you tell the proprietor to send them away?”
—Paris Spleen
City without Markers
In all the 70 poems of “Les Fleurs de Mal” and the 50 prose poems of “Paris Spleen,” such references are few. In “The Swan,” mention is made to Place de Carousel and the Louvre—though immediately the physical Paris is cancelled out:
“The Swan”
Suddenly crossing le nouveau Carousel
My fertile mind conceived your counterpart
Old Paris is no more (Ah, truth to tell,
Cities change faster than the human heart!)
Further on:
“Yes, Paris changes! But my wistful woe
Remains! For me, all becomes metaphor:
Faubourg and palace—old, new—come and go;
Weighty, my memories of what is no more.”
—Les Fleurs du Mal
Baudelaire’s Paris of anonymity could not be more different than the Paris of place-droppers like Hugo with Notre Dame or Zola with Les Halles, but his work is unmistakably steeped in Paris—a Paris of the imagination and a Paris of fluid time.
“Projects”
“Passing through a little street he stopped in front of a print shop, and looking through a portfolio and finding a picture of a tropical scene, he thought, ‘No! It is not in a palace that I should like to cherish my dear life….Here I have found a place in which to live and cultivate the dream of my life.’”
—Paris Spleen
Further, there is a sense that Baudelaire’s life in lived in the air. He wrote numerous poems about skies: “Cloudy Skies, Overcast Skies, Misty Skies. In “The Soup in the Clouds,” he contemplates “those moving architectural marvels that God constructs out of mist.”
“The Stranger”
“Then what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds…the clouds that pass above and beyond…the wonderful clouds!”
--Paris Spleen
Carousel, Louvre
A Writer and Flaneur
At age 20, Baudelaire announced to his mother and stepfather that he was done with studying law; he would dedicate his life to being a writer. They swiftly put him on a ship to Calcutta, India, to remove him from the city’s temptations and to give him something (else) to write about. He soon was back in Paris, meeting friends at the Hashish Club and squiring around his mistress Jeanne Duval, known as “Black Venus” and said to be the daughter of a mulatto prostitute.
His folks could take the boy out of Paris, at least for a short while, but they couldn’t take the Parisian debauchery out of the boy. Still, they kept trying: At 21, Baudelaire came of age to receive his inheritance from his long-deceased father. It was a considerable amount, yet Baudelaire would blow through it in two years. So his parents named a lawyer to serve as his guardian and to mete out modest funds judiciously. Working for wages was never in his plan, and he spent the rest of his life hounded by debtors as a consequence.
Baudelaire defined the Parisian as flaneur, and over the next quarter-century he did just what a flaneur does: He strolled the tangled streets and broad boulevards of Paris, soaking in the complexities of human life in the urban web. He found solitude in the anonymity of the city:
“Crowds”
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude;enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed a love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.
"Multitude, solitude: identical terms and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.
….
T"he solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of.”
—Paris Spleen
Baudelaire richly defined the flaneur in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” which itself is a critique of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd.” Poe’s short story, which was set in London and published in 1840, is also seminal in defining the flaneur. Here, again, is Baudelaire on crowds:
The Painter of Modern Life
“The Painter of Modern Life”
“The crowd is his element, as air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd…To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…The spectator is a prince who rejoices in his incognito….”
As Flaneur #1, Baudelaire cut a distinctive figure ambling around Paris. The photographer Nadar described his appearance (“black trousers, blue workman’s blouse, polished boots…curly hair worn long…hatless”) and his gait (“Baudelaire walked about his quartier of the city at an uneven pace, both nervous and languid, like a cat, choosing each stone of the pavement as if he had to avoid crushing an egg."
Several other factors were at play: Baudelaire’s mind often was altered by absinthe or opium. There also is the effect of motion itself. We now know that flowing lateral movement can release endorphins and create (to bend a term) a “flaneur’s high.” Whatever his stimulus or state of mind, Baudelaire saw more than streets and commerce; he saw multiple layers of life and time in his pursuit of revelation. In this regard, Baudelaire is the ultimate Parisian. And Paris is the ultimate city in which to slip through boundaries of time.
Time is an element in life that we often take for granted, but time is prominent in Baudelaire’s work, generally as a crushing burden to be cursed or eluded. In his verse, “Time” is capitalized.
“Get Drunk”
“One should always be drunk…Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite…If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”
--Paris Spleen
Sartre provides insight into Baudelaire’s notion of drunkenness, not from wine but by slipping time: ”He defined genius as childhood regained at will. He believed that the child sees everything as a novelty; he is always intoxicated.”
Further, says Sartre:
“It was for the absolute security of childhood that Baudelaire yearned….It never occurred to Baudelaire to destroy the idea of family. On the contrary…he never progressed beyond the stage of childhood.”
"The Gallant Marksman"
“As the carriage was going through the woods, he had it stop near a shooting gallery, saying that it would be pleasant to take a shot or two to kill Time. And is not killing that monster the most ordinary and legitimate occupation of all of us?”
—Paris Spleen
.
Walls speak.
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century"
Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” sees Baudelaire as a flaneur exploring, as if in a dream, an emerging modernist landscape where streets serve as a vascular network of imagination: “The flaneur travels in modern urban space but forever looks to the past. He reverts to the memory of the city….Baudelaire’s flaneur is trying to achieve a form of transcendence. In this transcendence, that flaneur see the city as theatricality and phantasmagoria.”
“Invitation au Voyage”(Paris Spleen version)
“Dreams! Always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate the soul, all the more impossible the dreams. Every man possesses his own dose of natural opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and from birth and death how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, be part of, that picture my imagination has painted, and that resembles you?”
—Paris Spleen
En Correspondence….
Benjamin also sees Baudelaire “en correspondence,” that is, corresponding with forces or visions not of his immediate time or place: “Flaneuring can allow one to pass through psychological and spiritual thresholds…to pass from reason to myth.”
“Correspondence” is this sense is to open oneself up to receiving revelation. Rimbaud would pursue the same quest of correspondence a generation later, inspired by Baudelaire whom he regarded as a god. One explanation for the riddle of Rimbaud—why he famously walked away from a brilliant writer’s gift at an age when it seems just to be fully flowering—is that he found “correspondence” through other means. His quest for revelation came by way of studying languages and exploring the greater world. This provided an enlightened pathway that writing once had shown him.
Baudelaire experienced no such rupture between his quest for “corresponding with revelation” and writing about it. Essential to his process was walking the streets of Paris, in a restless motion that may have assuaged the restlessness of his mind:
La Belle Epoque is eternal.
Anywhere Else in the World
“Anywhere Out of the World”
“Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds. One would like to suffer opposite the stove, another is sure he would get well beside the window.
“It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.”
—Paris Spleen
Again, Sartre links Baudelaire to Paris through his belief that “Creation is pure freedom” and that Baudelaire creates his own principles and his love of artifice, exemplified by the clothing that expresses man’s creativity and urbanity. “We know that after Retif, Balzac and Sue, he contributed largely to what Roger Callois calls ‘the myth of the great city,’” writes Sartre.
But where, specifically is the city in Baudelaire? For the reader, It is frustrating—well, let’s call it tantalizing—that when Baudelaire begins to ground his visions, he veers away. Physical places morph into portals to elsewhere:
“The Generous Gambler”
“Yesterday on the crowded boulevard, I felt myself jostled by a mysterious Being whom I have always longed to know…He gave me a knowing wink which I was quick to obey. I followed him closely and soon, still at his heels, descended into a magnificent subterranean dwelling of a fabulous luxury beyond anything the upper habitations of Paris could boast. And it seemed to me odd that I should have passed this enchanting haunt so often without suspecting that here was the entrance.”
—Paris Spleen
Returning to the cenotaph of Baudelaire, there is irony in that it stands tall in the midst of a city of the dead. Baudelaire’s verses define a Paris where all ages of the city live in simultaneity. As Baudelaire walked the streets of his Paris, he slipped through time and space to experience the full range of humanity, living and dead.
“Miss Bistoury”
“What oddities one finds in big cities when one knows how to roam and how to look. Life swarms with innocent monsters!”
—Paris Spleen
“Epilogue”
“Je t’aime, ô capitale infâme ! Courtisanes
Et bandits, tels souvent vous offrez des plaisirs
Que ne comprennent pas les vulgaires profanes.”
“Infamous City, I adore you! Courtesans
And bandits, you offer me such joys,
The vulgar herds can never understand.”
—Paris Spleen
Les toits de Paris. The rooftops of Paris.